Percona is hiring performance experts

Percona is hiring. We’ve added several experts recently and we’re growing at a fast but sustainable pace. The demand for our services is strong, and we have openings for more experts in the next couple of months.

Let me explain a little about what we’re looking for at the moment. While we do have a career path for less experienced people, right now we are looking for people who are top-level, senior experts in LAMP/Open-Source performance and scalability. Most of our work involves MySQL (at least peripherally, usually centrally) but not all of it; and we are looking for a PostgreSQL expert as well as systems administration and operations skills. If you’re also an expert in a related technology (e.g. Hadoop, popular cloud platforms, or some other component that you might expect to see at the Percona Performance Conference) we’d like to talk with you.

What’s it like to work at Percona? To begin with, it’s about creating value for people. Any successful business exchange has to leave all parties better off than they started. Our priorities are clear: there are two groups of people (employees and customers) and both must be first priority. It sounds like a paradox, but it works due to the company structure and the way we’ve assigned responsibilities. If you’d like to know how, email me personally and I’ll share the details.

Your peers will be talented and experienced professionals. You can expect very challenging work, and very good pay and benefits. Our clients bring us a lot of different types of work. It is not all remote DBA, nor is it all urgent troubleshooting or performance audits; it’s everything you can imagine, and it’s never the same from day to day. Fix my RAID controller! Why isn’t my firewall working? Optimize the query! Find and fix security problem in my application. Calculate when I’ll outgrow the server! Can you benchmark my application? Make me a new database user. Audit my application and tell me how to make it run faster. You are responsible for day-to-day operations of my whole backend and you have my IT team at your disposal. Please set up redundant failover and good backups!

We all work remotely, from our homes. There is currently not much required travel for most of us; a few of us do onsite work because of where we live, but most of us don’t (note that we do meet together at least yearly, and we go to conferences and other events). But we don’t require most consultants to be ready to travel 80% of the time.

We do not hire consultants in the way a lot of other consulting companies do. You do not become a “Percona franchisee,” you are an employee, although the legal structures vary from country to country. You don’t have to go find your own clients or keep your own billing systems like you do at some consulting companies.

The successful Percona consultant has a combination of experience, aptitude and attitude. You must be a technical expert of the highest caliber. You have to be a fast learner who pushes to learn new things. You have to be great with people; good communication and deep understanding of the customer’s needs is mandatory. You have to be willing to work really hard at unfamiliar things. You have to be able to manage your time, manage large quantities of email and a ton of other distractions, work with a variety of perhaps unfamiliar tools such as our Eventum CRM system, and communicate well. The most important thing is a fanatical attitude of customer-first; we have to understand the customer’s needs deeply. We have an entire process built around making sure we learn, document and act on what’s important to the customer and how they want us to accomplish it. This is not a cookie-cutter job where you can just apply some formula and follow the ten-step recipe to fill in a report like they do at Jiffy Lube. And finally, there’s a magical ingredient I can’t describe — it either works or it doesn’t. This Percona consulting is a real culture shock, even if you think you’re used to working in this fashion.

That last paragraph sounds like standard text for a job ad, but we mean it (notice that we do not require “proficiency with Microsoft Office”). You cannot fake it in this job. We generally start off with a try-it-out period of several months to see how things go.

Due to the above considerations and our growing demand, we’re particularly interested in people who might have a shorter start-up time, perhaps those who have experience working from their home for an email/IRC/chat/phone based support or consulting organization.